Written and directed by Jesse Eisenberg, ‘A Real Pain’ is a story about a family past, trauma and memory inherited by successive generations. In contrast, the landscape of contemporary Poland, against whose backdrop the film is set, is one that comes from the mind of a tourist; a curious, reliable tourist – free of prejudice, but full of warmth.
A group of tourists has come to Poland and is clowning around at the Warsaw Uprising Monument. One pretends to be wounded, another throws grenades, a nurse comes forward. Click, flash. Another souvenir photo of the trip. Further on, the tour stops at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw’s Muranów district. The guide warns: this will be a journey in the footsteps of ‘pain’. The tour looks like this: first the capital, the next stop is Lublin and the Majdanek death camp, among others. Among the tourists are David (Jesse Eisenerg) and Benji (Golden Globe-winning Kieran Culkin for this role), cousins, New Yorkers with Jewish roots. They came to Poland after the death of grandma Dora, who survived the Holocaust. ‘If it wasn’t for the war, we would probably be living here now. In the parallel world, we are Polish, have long beards and can’t shake a woman’s hand’, Benji notes.
With this film, Jesse Eisenberg returns to his roots; for to some extent, it intertwines with his own life story. The actor and director’s family – as he himself points out – lived longer in the Lublin area than in New York’s Queens, where Eisenberg was born. From Krasnystaw came Doris, his father’s aunt, who became the prototype for the character of grandmother Dora. Wanting to see where his relatives came from, Eisenberg visited Poland for the first time in 2017.
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‘A Real Pain’: By Jesse Eisenberg, photo: Disney
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Eventually, the director was prompted to write the script by an advertisement that was displayed to him on one of the online portals. It was an offer for a trip to Auschwitz with lunch included in the price. Eisenberg took the advertising slogan as a kind of quintessential example of a materialistic Western society devoted to consumption and ready to turn any experience, even a borderline one, into an industry and an attraction. ‘Hassle-free pick-up and drop-off make a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau effortless’, he said. ‘Enjoy the convenience of quick entry and air-conditioned transfers to hotels, making your visit hassle-free and convenient’. ‘Auschwitz? From the city centre? With a return ticket? Yes, it’s possible!’. These are just examples of the ‘Holocaust tourism’ offers that can be found online.
Apparently Eisenberg’s characters are travelling in the footsteps of the Holocaust in Poland, apparently the immensity of suffering is inscribed in visits to memorial sites such as Majdanek, but the formula of the tour is uncomfortable and embarrassing; it stops one from being thoughtful and fully focused. ‘Do none of you really notice the irony in this? Why are we going there in first class? Eighty years ago we would have been travelling in cattle cars, crowded like animals!’ – asks Benji of his fellow travellers at one point as they approach Lublin. He is the only one who feels a moral discomfort about it. The luxurious hotels, fancy breakfasts and transfers from the site prevent him from getting to the truth and his family roots; they separate him from the titular ‘real pain’. The experience of his grandmother and other Holocaust Survivors for Benjie is an image placed behind glass – he sees it, but it is distant, two-dimensional. This cognitive dissonance does not give him peace of mind.
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In this sense, A Real Pain is a film about trauma and its intergenerational transmission. The tragedy of Benjie and David, as descendants of Holocaust Survivors, is that they are unable – just like us – to understand Auschwitz or Majdanek. The very idea and attempt made by the protagonists to approach this experience is completely misguided and doomed to failure from the start. At the same time, Eisenberg poses here what is, in my opinion, the most important question: do we have the right to speak out about our pain, having in the back of our minds the ‘real pain’ of those who miraculously escaped death in the concentration camp? And on the other hand: should the suffering of people with different baggage be subject to evaluation; a hierarchy of better and worse, higher and lower? Can they be compared with each other? And finally, in what sense does someone else’s pain become part of our personal story?
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‘A Real Pain’: By Jesse Eisenberg, photo: Disney
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The next generation (reflected in Benjie’s attitude and eyes) is burdened with guilt because of its own privileged position. Played by Kieran Culkin, the character has an undercurrent of feeling that he should be grateful for existing, for being alive; for the prosperity that was not given to others. Perhaps this is why he is unable to call by name what ails him. He turns his private pain into joke and irony; he tries to dispose of it with constant, superficial chatter.
Eisenberg’s film, however, is not strictly a film about the Holocaust. It is a story about the relationship between two cousins, about two models of attitude, and these models are extreme. One is the constant movement and clutter lingering in Benjie’s head. The other model is David’s modest stability. The first is the incomparably more loud and expressive one; with his effusiveness he focuses everyone’s attention. The second is the more withdrawn and neurotic one; of the OCD type of person. Benji resents David for living the ordered life of a husband and father, and is no longer the same spontaneous, crying-for-any-reason teenager he once knew. ‘Yes, it was awful. Who wants to cry over everything?’ – David asks. Does this mean that, unlike Benjie, he has grown up? Or has he lost touch with his own emotions? This last sentence is one of the keys to A Real Pain.
Among those inclined towards a symbolic reading of the film, there are claims that Benji is not a real character at all – he was born in David’s head, he is entirely a product of his imagination; his double and second face, the more attractive one. Eisenberg does not mention such a reading in interviews, but we can speculate. There are also theses that are much more unexpected and exuberant – they say that Benji is supposed to be a dybbuk who cannot be at peace; he reminds the tour participants to respect the past and traditions. He demands remembrance and respect for the sacrifice of ancestors.
David stands firmly on the ground during his travels in Poland – he doesn’t try to soothe his conscience or satisfy any expectations or fantasies. While Benji wants to experience something more, different, more intense, he has few false hopes. When, in the finale, the cousins arrive at the house where their grandmother lived before the war, no catharsis takes place. Nothing happens, nothing changes. Someone else already lives in the grandmother’s former house; life goes on.
Eisenberg has repeatedly said that A Real Pain is a love letter to Poland. This declaration of love is somewhat over the top: the entire Polish cityscape – both contemporary places and those steeped in history – seems added, pretextual, and treated completely neutrally. Eisenberg is neither particularly impressed nor surprised by Poland. He does not give it any compliments, does not turn it into an exotic world from another galaxy. The Poland of Eisenberg’s film is simply characterised by the presence of the past in the present – new skyscrapers are interspersed with prefabricated housing estates, milk bars and ruins; the latter are a consequence of the war, but also strictly belong to the city’s Jewish past.
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Monument to Struggle and Martyrdom at Majdanek (Lublin), photo: Sławomir Olzacki/Forum
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Lublin is here a particular example of a place existing in two parallel dimensions: ‘here and now’ and ‘there and then’. Today, there is no trace left of the times when the city was one of the main pre-war centres for Jews. Podzamcze – the former Jewish quarter – is a breach in the landscape. Between the lines, Eisenberg manages to capture this impression of emptiness and state of absence. At one point he moves the action beyond the centre – to Majdanek. This is the strongest scene in the film, the most subdued and restrained, soundless in fact. Benji looks at the shoes of prisoners squeezed together in huge display cases. Tellingly, a few scenes earlier Benji had teased David by comparing his feet to those of his grandmother. In an instant he realises that one of the shoes could have belonged to her.
The final shot of A Real Pain, which forms a framing device together with the film’s opening, is also voiceless, muted and essentially wordless. The contrast between the location – the arrivals hall, where crowds of travellers and queues for the gates are visible – and the calmness painted on Benjie’s face creates an interesting tension. There is a lot going on in the silence; the airport itself is also an interesting metaphorical space – a non-place, something ‘in-between’, a transitional moment, a kind of vacuum. Benji is stuck in a state of such suspension from the beginning of the film – neither here (i.e. in the present) nor there (i.e. in the past, or perhaps more a memory of the past); between life and death.
A Real Pain. Written and directed by: Jesse Eisenberg. Cinematography: Michal Dymek. Editing: Robert Nassau. Production design: Mela Melak. Costumes: Malgorzata Fudala. Music: Erick Eiser. Starring: Jesse Eisenberg, Kieran Culkin, Will Sharpe. Polish premiere: 1st November 2024.
